If today you have been following, as best you can, the reports and analysis tumbling headlong out of the media about the furore over GCSE results you are possibly none the wiser.
Do we know if marking is more rigorous, or ‘brutal’ as Evan Davis put it, do we know if exams themselves have been made more difficult, do we know if the pass mark boundaries have been moved?
I’m in the dark. Thanks BBC.
However I have winkled out a few interesting and seemingly relevant bits of information from a days listening. (and hopefully correct info)
1. The English GCSE is no longer one exam..it is now split in two…English Literature and English Language. I would suggest that that in itself may be the reason English grades have altered….the BBC fail to mention this surely relevant information.
2. That in 2011 the government put into law that exam marking standards would not be made more exacting but would remain the same standard as from 2011…that is, they wouldn’t reduce the number of people passing at the same grades as those in 2011 but would stop further grade inflation which might otherwise result from easier marking.
3. …and oh yes….‘these new GCSEs in maths, English and ICT, had been brought in by the previous Labour government.’
So who is to blame if anyone?
Labour says…”Michael Gove and his education ministers must explain what has happened.”
If only someone would….BBC inform and educate?
Just watched Chris McGovern, Chairman of ‘Campaign for Real Education’ tear a new rectum for the BBC TV news (BBC News Channel) commentator about 2 minutes ago. Completely blew away any and all ‘argument’ put forward by the BBC resident union rep on behalf of the lefty Teachers’ Unions, regarding grade creep over the past 20 years or more.
Now THAT’s the sort of informed, no-nonsense, approach current government representatives need to adopt to completely obliterate the BBC’s left-wing tendency – pick up every point and shoot it down, where necessary, and accept no ‘buts’ or ‘but-ifs’ from these wannabe champagne socialists.
Favourite quote (baldly summarised) – “Singapore’s students out-qualify UK students by passing ‘O’-Levels – set up and set out in the UK – against the UK’s GCSE passes – what a humiliation’.
Glenys Stacey the CEO of Ofqual was on R4 at 8:10 this morning & put Davis firmly in place. She did the same on Sky News at lunchtime
Heard that interview too, this morning. Evan Davis tried his usual trick of dropping a couple of really biased, negative, and left-wing statements, followed by a long-winded question. The interviewee calmly waited till he’d finished all of this malarkey, then took issue with his initial ‘mis-characterisation of the truth’, before batting away his question superbly. Clear, informed, and concise dealing with the BBC, and not allowing any interviewer to get away with these tactics. More required. Mind you, I have noticed that Davis tries ever so hard to ensure that, since he always has the last word, he sneaks in a negative and biased comment right at the end of the interview if points have been made with which he disagrees.
Even-handed BBC ? – yup – they’ll have no hesitation in smacking your gob with both hands if you don’t toe their line.
Evan-handed ,more likely Richard.
And-as a teacher-I`ve deliberately NOT been the BBCs “yellow brick road” wearing “Dorothys shoes” heading “over the rainbow”
All this is Evans chosen path, to a Lennon soundtrack with a Marley spliff dangling from his sneery mouth…and showing his perpetual rebellion credentials, by threatening to spit it over his old prep schools wall.
Not been listening to a word of it…you just KNOW what the BBC will be saying about it-as if any of them actually ever went to a State comp .
No-that would be where their new partners kids would go once the school fees are stopped, because they`ve now found their new inner Dorothy…and making a go of a marriage is so bourgeois…
Propagandist BBC-NUJ very reluctant to even mention the of impact on educational standards of MASS IMMIGRATION into the UK, and large numbers of immigrants for whom English is not their first language, and for whom English is not spoken at home.
I really don’t know what’s going on here.
As I understand it, and I could be wrong, does everybody who could spell their name correctly last year now get a lower grade for performing the same task this year ?
Given that I have just listened to a right nut case on, and uninterrupted of course, on BBC R4 saying it’s all the Tories fault that the future generation are going to be denied exciting opportunities, it does beg the BBC HARD NEWS QUESTIONS :
Do we need unnecessary Mathematicians and Scientists the UK ?
Why aren’t there more Social workers performing heroics ?
Anybody like to give me an A***** +extra A* for my best efforts ?
If not, it’s Pounland for me !
Indoctrinated children of crackpot Labour for eight or nine 9 years of their education, weren’t they? Plus with nearly three of those years being under Ballsup… Pretty understandable results really.
In the dark?
Getting any sense so far on this issue has been impossible.
I must try and track down Mr. McGovern.
The entire MSM seems to have had a problem deciding whether to go for a tribal ‘any change is bad’ gov(e)-bashing for the whinge-sector or a ‘look at the A* joys of our new multi-culti nirvana’ feel-good ratings hoopla to keep the sofa-set mellow.
And promptly fell inbetween cracks of their own making.
Watching endless moppets, with Sideshow Bob hairstyles a shoo-in for getting invited to the fore, open their envelopes to a whooping A**withcherry&sprinkles sat oddly with the Corporal Frasers wheeled out in the studio to say said youths were ‘angry and upset’.
Somewhere Paul Mason awakes from his extended summer holiday slumbers.